Date of Award
Spring 5-8-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
First Advisor
Theodora Ziolkowski
Committee Members
Brad Modlin
William Burns
Heather Kennedy
Keywords
family, generation, omaha, mother, father, son, daughter, secret, trauma
Abstract/Description
PRAXINOSCOPE is a literary novel that explores the lives and inter-relationships of a family spanning one hundred years, from 1925 to 2025. It has a large cast of first-person narrators. Through the writing of PRAXINOSCOPE, I explored the challenges of writing a cohesive story when many individual characters contribute to the narrative. The result is a family—rather than a single individual—as the protagonist. Additionally, I explored the use of first-, second-, and third-person narratives to bring readers into the story at different levels of familiarity. PRAXINOSCOPE is almost entirely written in first-person narrative. However, I strategically broke the first-person narrative during key parts of the story. Through third-person narratives, I created a sense of “out” by separating the reader from the intimate thoughts of the character. Through a single second-person narrative, I created a sense of familiarity and intimacy, allowing the reader to experience the story as if they were in it. Ultimately, I examined how voice allows the reader to relate to the story. Through more than one hundred chapters, each taking place chronologically in subsequent summer, a larger story unfolds asking the question: What choices do individual family members make that influence the other family members, and how does time reverberate those choices?
Recommended Citation
Hughes, Bethany, "PRAXINOSCOPE: A NOVEL" (2026). English Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity. 23.
https://openspaces.unk.edu/eng-etd/23